Dwight: The Gold Cure Capital of America

The village of Dwight was platted in eighteen fifty-four as a stop on the Chicago and Alton Railroad and named for a New York investor, Henry Dwight, who helped finance the line. It might have remained a quiet grain depot but for a doctor named Leslie Keeley, who in eighteen seventy-nine opened a clinic here based on his belief that alcoholism was a disease rather than a moral failure. Keeley's treatment, which he called the Gold Cure, combined exercise, diet, and injections of a secret compound.

Word spread fast. By the eighteen nineties, Dwight had become a destination for wealthy Americans seeking help with alcohol and drug dependence, drawing thousands of patients a year. Frank Lloyd Wright later designed the First National Bank building here in nineteen oh five.

Route Sixty-Six came through in nineteen twenty-six, and for decades drivers stopped at the eighteen ninety-one Dwight Depot, which still stands on the old main street today.